The Question of Cultural Identity in V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, Half a Life, and Magic Seeds


Dr. Öğr. Üyesi MUZAFFER ZAFER AYAR

Tez Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Karabük Üniversitesi, Lisansüstü Eğitim Enstitüsü, İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı, Türkiye

Tez Danışmanı: Prof. Dr. A. Serdar Öztürk

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2021

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Desteklendiği Program: Diğer

Özet:

It has always been difficult to give a new pace to culture and cultural identity for those leaving the lands they were born in. Although culture and cultural values along with cultural identity are dynamic facts, there is generally an instinctual demand for the original culture. When the Third World countries were exposed to colonial oppression, they went through a long process of cultural transformation. Many colonized countries came face to face with new cultural dictations imposed on them by the colonizing ideology. Although the situation varies from generation to generation, subjugated citizens, enslaved indentured workers, and displaced elites always longed for their authentic culture and cultural identities. This transformation, of course, did not take place overnight. Indeed, it was a centuries-long process for the colonizer countries to implement such debilitating measure in the cultural, political, and social sense. Therefore, it is not an issue for the Third World subjects to work to reverse the situation in their own favor. As of the mid-20th century when the decolonization gained a fast momentum, many critics, especially those directly linked to subjugated cultures, dealt with the issue of cultural values. One of the forerunner critic of this trend was Homi Bhabha whose criticism in the cultural sense is still accepted in the literary circles. If it is the topic related to ‘cultural identity’ it is unavoidable to associate Bhabha’s The Location of Culture with that of other world-famous critics such as Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak and many others. In other words, he has always been in interaction with all the other postcolonial critics of the postcolonial period. In tandem with the question of cultural identity, this dissertation intends to tackle this issue from the perspective of Bhabha’s a number of critical terms such as “hybridity,” “mimicry,” “ambivalence,” “unhomeliness,” “third space,” and so on and so forth. All the aforementioned critical terms will be applied to V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street, Half a Life and Magic Seeds with a motivation to clarify the condition of postcolonial cultural identity in postcolonial era.

       Keywords: cultural identity, decolonization, hybridity, unhomeliness, mimicry, third space